Automated telephone systems are not extensively used to both place and receive telephone calls. For example, airline reservation systems and banks may utilize the inbound or call receiving features of the automated telephone system, while marketing groups and credit collection departments will utilize the outbound calling features of the system.
Users of the outbound or call dialing feature of an automated telephone system desire to optimize system performance and ensure that all available operators constantly have a call to answer, while simultaneously ensuring than an answered call will not be inconvenienced or lost due to being placed on hold for an extended period of time. Additionally, users of such systems know that a percentage of the calls dialed will not be answered. Consequently, more calls are dialed then there are operators or agents.
The most basic prior art call pacing systems, therefore, simply maintain a predetermined ratio of lines dialing to operators on duty. This ratio is generally displayed to a supervisor who must constantly monitor and adjust the ratio based upon the length of operator-to-client connect time, a higher number of answered calls, and the number of operators available. Accordingly, this method has proven to be a very non-uniform, manual call pacing system.
Current call pacing systems typically monitor historical call hold activity. Monitoring the historical call hold activity includes monitoring the percentage of calls that were placed on hold. That is, the number of calls that were put on hold out of all the calls that were answered. Based on the percent on hold, the supervisor or the system reduces the call dialing pace.
Prior art systems which monitor only historical call hold activity do not, however, account for and monitor the amount of time a current call is spending on hold. Neither do they account for customer hold discomfort. For example, it is far worse to have a low percentage of callers kept on hold for 20 seconds then for a high percentage of calls to be kept on hold for only 2 seconds. In addition, merely accounting for the average amount of time that previously answered calls spent on hold, also called On Hold Time Average, does not account for current calls on hold, as well as for the fact that many minutes pass from the time an adjustment is made in the dialing frequency to the time that results are seen as a change in on hold time average. Accordingly, large fluctuations in dialing frequency result in numerous idle operators if calls are paced too slowly, and a dramatically increased on hold time averages and many lost calls if calls are paced too quickly.
Further, an additional problem facing all systems is that the on hold time average will fluctuate from user-to-user, site-to-site and campaign-to-campaign and thus, must be constantly monitored and manually updated.